Word: laned
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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English publishers used to say the same thing-until 1935. That year, in London, a handsome young man named Allen Lane, 33-year-old son of an architect, quit his job in his uncle's publishing house (the famed Bodley Head) and started publishing pocket-size, paperbound Penguin books. His original capital: ?100. His publishing office: a crypt beneath a Soho church. Tables were tomb tops; storage space was empty tombs. The first six months he sold over a million copies, including such titles as Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, André Maurois' Ariel, Mowrer...
...selling 35,000 copies a day, big delivery trucks were rolling in and out of the churchyard, and Allen Lane had become the most spectacular success in British publishing history. The price of Penguin books: 6d (12?) a copy; the profit on each...
Published at the rate of ten books a month, in first printings of at least 50,000 copies, Penguin books now sell 12,500,000 copies a year. But much bigger things are in the offing. Allen Lane is now on a four-month tour of India and the Near East. If those markets look as good as they sound, he will begin his biggest venture yet: publishing Penguin books in Basic English, a simple 850-word vocabulary sifted out by Orthologist-Critic Charles Kay Ogden. Besides the prospect of getting rich while combining two of the liveliest ideas...
...foggy afternoon 100 years ago last week a horse cart rattled from the murky London docks to Mincing Lane with eight deodar chests containing 350 Ibs. of tea. This was the first consignment of tea grown in the British Empire and Auctioneer William J. Thomson knocked it down at a record price of 25 shillings a pound to a patriotic Captain Pidding...
...foggy day last week three sandaled elephants, followed by Cinemactor ("Elephant Boy") Sabu in a Rolls-Royce, ambled from St. Katherine's Docks to Mincing Lane with 37 silver and chromium chests of tea. Auctioneer William J. Thomson, grandson of the 1839 William J., knocked them down at prices ranging from $6,000 for the silver to $100 for the chromium to bigwig tea merchants, brokers and producers. Thus celebrated was the Empire Tea Centenary; thus furthered was a publicity drive to spur Britain's great tea trade...